The market watching wizards at Gartner have taken another gaze in the crystal ball, and after some buffing and polishing have decided that the outlook for the semiconductor industry in 2012 is a bit better than they had expected as 2011 came to a close.

Huawei Australia is inching closer to securing the national tender for Optus’ LTE rollout following its placement as technology partner for the commercial rollout of an LTE network in Newcastle and surrounding areas.

Science has no standard definition of a galaxy, and a good one is needed because recent observations have found objects in space that “challenge traditional notions of both galaxies and star clusters.”

Apple has decided to up the ante on trademark dispute foe and failed Asian monitor vendor Proview, accusing the firm of misleading the courts and of trying to milk the iPad maker for more money in order to pay off its creditors.

India’s rapid technological ascent in the 21st century appears to have left the nation wanting in a few basic areas after the country’s newly released 2011 Census revealed that more households own a mobile phone than an indoor toilet.

The European Union has joined the United States and Japan in complaining to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over China’s continued export restrictions on a range of rare earths which are vital to the production of hi-tech kit.

Angelina-Jolie-inna-wetsuit related news on the science wires this morning, as boffins in America announce that the underwater volcano off the shore of the famous, beautiful Greek island of Santorini is showing signs of trouble coming.

The Sunday Times' use of a Call of Duty character to illustrate an article about a real-life military operation has left bloggers up in arms. Some claim the use of such an image is not ethically right.

Vid
Keen-eyed skywatchers have spotted a mysterious object emerging from the Sun that, according to the tinfoil-hatted YouTube majority, can only be a UFO, a small black hole, a world-destroying weapon or maybe a new planet.

Product round-up
FireWire interfacing has been around since the mid-1990s and, as far as Apple is concerned, looks set to be ousted by its new Thunderbolt technology in due course. However, it still features on most new Macs, is available for PCs and remains popular in desktop audio and video environments. It's also a convenient option for shifting data around with legacy kit too. Indeed, FireWire's sustained data rates are better than USB 2.0 making it ideal for backups and file transfers.

Motorola Mobility said it would only hand over licences for its standards-essential patents to Apple if the fruity firm licensed all of its patent portfolio in return, Apple apparently revealed to the European Commission.

Sysadmin blog
Windows Server "8" beta is out, and everyone reading this should sit up and take notice. This isn't a boring iteration on a previous server operating system wherein a few tweaks have been achieved and nothing really changes. Server 8 - along with the suite of associated 2012-ish server applications - is nothing short of a complete redefinition of the server landscape.

The UK Competition Commission's four-year probe into Sky Movies has shifted gear, with the agency acknowledging that the market has changed significantly since it produced its interim judgment last summer.

Tonight's the night for NASA's five rockets in five minutes plan, providing the skies stay clear, with the first launch scheduled for sometime between midnight and 1.30am EST (5am to 6.30am on 15 March GMT).

Apple's iPad share of the fondleslab market slipped slightly in the last quarter from 61.5 per cent to 54.6 per cent. But with the demand for tablets booming and Apple selling 15.4 million units in the last quarter of 2011, it's unlikely anyone will shed tears over these results in Cupertino.

Twenty-first century cloudy infrastructure doesn't require the traditional break-fix maintenance of 20th century server and storage infrastructure. And so Hewlett-Packard's Technology Services division is rejigging its support services to reflect what customers actually need – and will pay for.

If data presented in a in a blog post by Ubuntu project founder and "benevolent dictator" Mark Shuttleworth is any indication, then Canonical's Ubuntu variant of the Debian strain of Linux is waxing on public web services while Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is waning.

Australian Internet users are turned off by overly-intrusive personal data collection, according to a study conducted by Queensland University, and we want more information about how information is collected and used.

A serial entrepreneur with a penchant for sales has made Cisco Systems an offer that it most certainly can refuse and also snicker at: $1, plus a 15 per cent equity stake, in rival SalesCrunch if Cisco hands over its WebEx online meeting biz.

Ten to twenty per cent of utterances collected by voice biometrics systems are not strong identifiers of the individual that spoke them, according to Dr. Clive Summerfield, the founder of Australian voice biometrics outfit Armorvox. Voice biometrics systems could therefore wrongly identify users under some circumstances.

After keeping a low profile for some years, a startup called Twin Creeks Technologies has gone public with an interesting approach to making solar panels: it uses an ion gun to slice ultra-thin leaves from a wafer.